How to use this site

Welcome to dw-wp.com!

dw-wp.com will help you learn to make, read, and teach comics. It’s the website component of the comics education project of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, which also includes the comics textbook Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and its follow-up volume, Mastering Comics. However, it’s more than just a companion to the books.

This website is a dynamic, ever-growing resource where you’ll find something useful or enlightening whether you’re a beginning cartoonist or a seasoned pro, an educator or just an interested reader.

Check out some highlights

Don’t know where to start? Why not check out some of our favorite posts from the blog:

Make a “foldy” minicomic is a great example of the innovative, often slightly avant-garde activities we like to do with our students.

Color in Context is an illustrated essay on a very particular aspect of comics language. It will be as enlightening for comics readers and teachers as for learning cartoonists

3-day comics workshop: the Huntington report is an example of the kind of workshop we do regularly around the country and around the world. You get a sense of how the class went and we also share our lesson plans and observations (often with student examples) on specific activities.

Guest post: The silence of cartooning We regularly invite colleagues and peers to write posts for us and this one, by Jarod Roselló, is one of our favorites. Rather than share a particular activity, Jarod instead evokes a particular aspect of the teaching experience that fellow teachers are sure to appreciate.

How can we help you?

But dw-wp.com isn’t just a blog. We have a deep and growing collection of teaching and learning materials, book guides, and other resources on the site. Click the link(s) below that apply to you and we’ll go into more detail. Are you…

Resources

This is a new section that will contain collections of material, for example, a set of posts on a topic like lettering, or a collection of the activities that we’ve published on the site, that might get lost in the blog stream. We’ll also include links, checklists, and downloads that you can use to teach or study comics; everything from a blank 9-panel grid to use for jam comics to a complete index to both of our books.

Community

We are active in many different platforms and hope you’ll check us out, follow us, like us and so on—we’ll return the love! And you can always contact us using outdated, pre-millennial technology like e-mail.

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FIRST SECOND is an imprint of Roaring Brook Press / Macmillan USA. Macmillan owns some of America's most prestigious publishers, known for great integrity and literary quality. These include Henry Holt, FSG, St Martin's Press, Tor and Picador, all of which have garnered the most coveted prizes in publishing.